[ARSCLIST] NYT: Ted Perry, 71, the Founder of the Hyperion Record Label, Dies

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Ted Perry, 71, the Founder of the Hyperion Record Label, Dies
NYT February 11, 2003
By ALLAN KOZINN

Ted Perry, the founder of Hyperion Records, a British
classical music label known for exploring the byways of the
repertory as devotedly as it does the core literature, died
on Sunday in London. He was 71 and lived in London.

The cause was lung cancer, said his daughter Nicola Perry.


Mr. Perry, who was born in May 1931, came from a
working-class background and became fascinated with music
after a childhood hip operation left him in leg braces and
unable to participate in sports. He began memorizing the
details of record catalogs, not only the works and
performers but also the selection numbers for each disc,
and in his late teens he was employed to run the record
department at EMG Handmade Gramophones, a small but
well-known shop in London.

When Deutsche Grammophon, the German classical label,
opened a London office in 1956, he joined the company to
oversee its first British releases. But he remained with
the company for only a year, moving to Sydney, Australia,
in 1957 to run the marketing and distribution department at
Festival Records.

Mr. Perry returned to London in 1961 and joined Saga, a
small British label, as its director of artists and
repertory. He left the company in 1963 after its management
opposed some of his recording plans, but he returned in
1973. In the mid-1970's he left Saga again to start
Meridian Records with a partner, John Shuttleworth. And in
1980 he left Meridian to start Hyperion with his wife,
Doreen (from whom he was divorced in 1981), and a financial
partner, Bill Singer.

Hyperion quickly established itself as a label with a taste
for the unusual. Among its earliest recordings where
recordings of the Finzi and Stanford Clarinet Concertos,
played by Thea King, and an organ transcription of
Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," performed by
Arthur Wills. Hyperion quickly won a following among
collectors, both for its explorations of otherwise
neglected British composers, early Romantics and medieval
and Baroque works, and for the warm quality of its sound.

Still, in those early years Mr. Perry drove a taxi to
supplement his income, and his family spent its evenings
packaging discs around the kitchen table. That changed in
1984 when the company released "Sacred Vocal Music of
Monteverdi," with the soprano Emma Kirkby, the tenor Ian
Partridge and the bass David Thomas, and "A Feather on the
Breath of God," a collection of works by the 12th-century
abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Both became huge and steady
sellers for the label.

Mr. Perry went on to build Hyperion into the largest
independent classical label in Britain, with a catalog of
about 1,200 titles. Among the highlights of its releases
was a 36-CD survey of the complete songs of Schubert,
overseen by the pianist Graham Johnson, with vocal
performances by some of the best Schubert singers of the
1980's and 1990's, among them Dame Janet Baker, Elly
Ameling, Arlee Auger, Lucia Popp, Edith Mathis, Anthony
Rolfe-Johnson, Thomas Allen, Thomas Hampson and Margaret
Price.

Mr. Perry is survived by a son, Simon, of London, and two
daughters, Louise, of London, and Nicola, of New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/obituaries/11PERR.html